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Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

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Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#71

Post by jlgaddis »

jjoonathan wrote: post #54
thoman23 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but Amazon as a retail operation is so well run with such excellent customer service it's hard to imagine Walmart outcompeting them.

Walmart is cheaper. Significantly cheaper. You don't have to pay $100-$300 per year plus Amazon's typical 10-20% price premium* in exchange for "free" 2-day shipping. If you live in the right place you can pick up the goods same-day from Walmart, maybe even on your commute, so for some people it's more convenient too. * The usual caveat about everything varying with geography applies here too, I'm sure.

Is "in-store pickup" really that popular?

When I need something in a few days (or later), I'll order it from Amazon when I think about it. If I need something "now" or today, I'll just drive to the store and go get it. I, personally, don't really see the point of the "in-store pickup" -- why order it online if I have to go there to get it anyways?

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#72

Post by downandout »

lostcolony wrote: post #63
downandout wrote: post #60

I'm trying to understand why large companies use AWS for their primary infrastructure. Both AWS and Azure are obscenely expensive when compared to buying servers and colocating them somewhere. The cloud model works well for bootstrapped startups, but anyone with the resources to buy and manage their own servers is crazy if they use AWS or Azure as their primary server platform.

Is it? Cloud providers bring you not just localized infrastructure, but distributed infrastructure, with clear mechanisms for scaling as needed, plus support, etc. With AWS, you have a predictable cost, predictable up-time, and ability to scale at peak, and your costs are spread over time, rather than all up front. With your own servers you have to build out to handle peak load (and run mostly dormant during non-peak…

I'm guessing that Netflix is getting truly massive discounts from their published rates. For most everyone else, it won't make sense.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#73

Post by jlgaddis »

beastman82 wrote: post #45
jsjohnst wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because that's a logical reason they make billions and not because large companies like Netflix (not to mention pretty much every tech startup these days) use them so heavily.

Or maybe, just maybe, he was joking.

Perhaps. Since it's impossible to tell, however, the safest assumption is that he wasn't.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#74

Post by danbucholtz »

ksec wrote: post #61

Off Topic, Previously I was always put off by Amazon's design. You can click on anything Amazon related, AWS included and see some fugly UI and layout. And i got to check AWS again and i am pleasantly surprised things have improved dramatically!

It's a better UI than Azure imo. The UI is not nearly as intuitive or clean.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#75

Post by irishcoffee »

ksec wrote: post #61

Off Topic, Previously I was always put off by Amazon's design. You can click on anything Amazon related, AWS included and see some fugly UI and layout. And i got to check AWS again and i am pleasantly surprised things have improved dramatically!

As an aside, I worked in a directorate, and the director of said directorate (who worked at amazon before us) told a story every so often of meetings he would be invited to, where the amazon UI team would agonize over specific pixel placements of text and images on the amazon website.

The amusing part to me (this was years ago) was internally I was always thinking "their website is, at the very least, non-intuitive and overwhelming" when he told such stories.

I guess they found better UX people. =pp

edit: typo

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#76

Post by boulos »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #69
guelo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's way more significant than I would have expected. Still, 8% of their revenue contributes 36% of their profits. Makes you wonder why they don't run AWS at the same cutthroat prices as their other businesses.

You have to realize they have been consistently cutting prices (and pulling Google and somewhat Azure) along with them.

I think you misinterpret the causality of recent cloud price drops: Google's price drops at year pushed AWS to follow suit, and they haven't matched since (the gap is greater than 20% for GCE vs EC2 now). Microsoft is also publicly committed to matching AWS.

Huge Disclaimer: I work at Google on GCE.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#77

Post by latch »

lostcolony wrote: post #63
downandout wrote: post #60

I'm trying to understand why large companies use AWS for their primary infrastructure. Both AWS and Azure are obscenely expensive when compared to buying servers and colocating them somewhere. The cloud model works well for bootstrapped startups, but anyone with the resources to buy and manage their own servers is crazy if they use AWS or Azure as their primary server platform.

Is it? Cloud providers bring you not just localized infrastructure, but distributed infrastructure, with clear mechanisms for scaling as needed, plus support, etc. With AWS, you have a predictable cost, predictable up-time, and ability to scale at peak, and your costs are spread over time, rather than all up front. With your own servers you have to build out to handle peak load (and run mostly dormant during non-peak…

Yes, it is.

"If you’re used to designing and deploying applications in your own data centers, you need to be prepared to unlearn a lot of what you know."

Which is it? Did it save them money because they didn't have to "build their own redundancy and failover" or did they have to build a bunch of custom tools like Chaos Monkey because "I knew to expect higher rates of individual instance failure in AWS, but I hadn’t thought through some of these sorts of implications." ???

From reading Netflix' blog, it's clear that it was a huge learning and engineering effort. That cost has to be taken into account and added to the fact that across many AWS offerings, you're looking at as much as a 10x price / performance penalty versus dedicated or collocation. I'm unconvinced that they couldn't have done it cheaper and better through more transitional approaches, and moreso that it's a meaningful indicator for anyone else.

AWS has been massively innovative. But it's much more expensive, and a huge part of their business is sales and getting CXOs onboard, not necessarily providing good value.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#78

Post by amazon_not »

latch wrote: post #77
lostcolony wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? Cloud providers bring you not just localized infrastructure, but distributed infrastructure, with clear mechanisms for scaling as needed, plus support, etc. With AWS, you have a predictable cost, predictable up-time, and ability to scale at peak, and your costs are spread over time, rather than all up front. With your own servers you have to build out to handle peak load (and run mostly dormant during non-peak…

Yes, it is. "If you’re used to designing and deploying applications in your own data centers, you need to be prepared to unlearn a lot of what you know." Which is it? Did it save them money because they didn't have to "build their own redundancy and failover" or did they have to build a bunch of custom tools like Chaos Monkey because "I knew to expect higher rates of individual instance failure in AWS, but I hadn’t t…

"That cost has to be taken into account and added to the fact that across many AWS offerings, you're looking at as much as a 10x price / performance penalty versus dedicated or collocation."

This.

The pricing is especially egrerious in bandwidth charges which for AWS are almost pure profit.

Amazon is only cheap if you don't use it.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#79

Post by Johnny555 »

lostcolony wrote: post #63
downandout wrote: post #60

I'm trying to understand why large companies use AWS for their primary infrastructure. Both AWS and Azure are obscenely expensive when compared to buying servers and colocating them somewhere. The cloud model works well for bootstrapped startups, but anyone with the resources to buy and manage their own servers is crazy if they use AWS or Azure as their primary server platform.

Is it? Cloud providers bring you not just localized infrastructure, but distributed infrastructure, with clear mechanisms for scaling as needed, plus support, etc. With AWS, you have a predictable cost, predictable up-time, and ability to scale at peak, and your costs are spread over time, rather than all up front. With your own servers you have to build out to handle peak load (and run mostly dormant during non-peak…

Plus, many companies have very bursty workloads - we can (and often do) scale from 100 servers up to 1000+ servers several times a day. Without AWS we'd be paying for 1000 servers 24x7, now we only pay for them several hours a day.

We've run the numbers, and we can't host it ourselves anywhere close to what we pay Amazon if we want the same amount of redundancy that AWS gives us "for free" -- we'd have to duplicate most of our infrastructure across 4 separate datacenters to get the kind of multi-AZ, Multi-region redundancy we have now.

Re: Amazon Web Services revenue rises 81% year over year

#80

Post by [deleted] »

lostcolony wrote: post #63
downandout wrote: post #60

I'm trying to understand why large companies use AWS for their primary infrastructure. Both AWS and Azure are obscenely expensive when compared to buying servers and colocating them somewhere. The cloud model works well for bootstrapped startups, but anyone with the resources to buy and manage their own servers is crazy if they use AWS or Azure as their primary server platform.

Is it? Cloud providers bring you not just localized infrastructure, but distributed infrastructure, with clear mechanisms for scaling as needed, plus support, etc. With AWS, you have a predictable cost, predictable up-time, and ability to scale at peak, and your costs are spread over time, rather than all up front. With your own servers you have to build out to handle peak load (and run mostly dormant during non-peak…

[deleted]
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